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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but I seem to recall them describing the snitch as ‘basically invisible’ and the players flying under the bleachers and into the stratosphere in pursuit of it. Those might be exceptions, maybe the frog only sometimes wanders out into the parking lot.


  • It’s worse than that though. The parking lot frog adds a huge, but not impossible, score to your team if you catch it AND it instantly ends the game.

    So even if one team is absolutely crushing the other, it’s not actually going to even things out unless it is in a very specific range of uneven matches.

    Being so overwhelmingly outclassed makes a neat sort of metagame about preventing the parking lot frog from being caught. Though the frog is apparently hard enough to catch even once that defending it is sort of besides the point. Even if the frog hunt suddenly has a second dynamic, it’s still taking place pretty much completely outside of the view of the audience.











  • It’s percentage of the entire population, if you organized everyone from lowest to highest IQ, what percentage of the entire population would you need to include for them to be in the top. It’s a little clearer when a point of interest is near the top. E.G. “person is in the top 1% of people in terms of wealth.”

    A less kind way to say it is ‘91% of people have a higher IQ than this person’.


  • I imagine if my occupation includes carrying a gun, interacting with citizens, and a historically high rate of extrajudicial deaths amongst people I am supposed to be protecting. A publicly accessible camera would be beneficial to easing the minds of those I interact with and providing evidence for any actual instances where I felt my life was threatened.








  • Linnaean taxonomy classifies apes and monkeys as two closely related groups. This is the classification system most people are taught in grade school.

    Cladistics is a style of classification that seeks to organize species and groups of species from when they branched off of other groups of species. In this style, everything is defined by novel features, but they are still members of the more ancient clade. Birds for instance, would be a novel clade emerging from Dinosaurs, and thus all birds are also dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.

    Because there are two groups of monkeys with unique characteristics (new world and old world), and apes have unique adaptations not found in either group, we have no way of cladistically defining a monkey in a way that meaningfully does not also include apes.

    As a side note, this is where the phrase “there is no such thing as a fish” comes from. ‘Fish’ in the Linnaean sense are a huge and diverse category. Two random members of the fish class would likely be far, far more distantly related than a random mammal and a random reptile.